YODA PRESS

HIGH NOON AND THE BODY by Kyla Pasha

Kyla Pasha’s poems sparkle with the rediscovery of song’s electricity while losing none of the sophisticated edge of argument. Pasha’s poems move in several directions, unconstrained by doctrinaire notions of what a poem should do and be. She speaks to present, distant or departed interlocutors; meditates on how we lose and find ourselves again through travel; brings news of war to the front lawn, speaks crisp commonsense to the robed spectres of Death and Memory. The self opens to the world, and the world to the self, in Pasha’s poems, through the realisation that we are formed by the irreducible compound of love, betrayal, forgiveness and anger that swirls constantly in the fragile crucible of the body.

In the South Asian context, ‘woman poet’ is all too often a title claimed by simple appeal to physiognomy and asserted through conformity with the dictionary of a feminist cliché. Kyla Pasha is among the exception to this norm, who work to earn their title. She crafts her way through the labyrinth of language, attending sensitivity to the image and cadence, the murmur of several tongues; if her ear is tuned to the intimate tremors of the heart, it also records the epic turbulences both of South Asia and a world in ecological and political meltdown.